For those who aspire to do business online, especially selling through the internet, an E-commerce website is a necessity. It helps you reach potential customers who might be unable to access you physically.

With an E-commerce website, you can buy or sell physical goods, virtual goods, services etc.

On this thread I'll present steps that will help anyone (that includes those without web design and programming skills) put up a fully functional E-commerce website using Wordpress.

Thanks bro, it will be highly appreciated.

Nice one,,,am in class already,,lets kick off

Basic Requirements Before Set Up

Setting up an E-commerce site, like every other worthwhile project, requires proper preparation & planning to ensure success.

As earlier mentioned, the knowledge of web design/development skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, ASP.net, MySQL) is not mandatory.

However, good knowledge of some of them will prove helpful. And increase your chances of fully customizing your site to suit your taste.

When planning, you need to consider the following

- What kind of products/services you will be selling/buying. Product v Services. Physical v Virtual etc

- Your domain name. (SEO experts advice you choose a name that reflects your business type). Buying domain name is much cheaper today i.e. between N1,500 to N2,500 and much higher if you want .ng TLD.

- Your hosting. Your website needs to be hosted. For a typical website, shared hosting would be fine. But for E-commerce website, I suggest you go for VPS (Virtual Private Server). VPS is a logically created sever which has the benefits of a dedicated physical server. Using this hosting plan helps improve security of your site.

VPS hosting can be bought for as low as $20 monthly. The more the features you want, the more you have to pay for it. Before committing yourself to any hosting company, be sure you do your research in order to ascertain if the hosting company actually delivers on it's promises.

- SSL Connection. SSL is a protocol (communication standard) designed to provide security over the internet. Since online shopping requires customers to send sensitive data over the internet, SSL will ensure that the communication with your server is "private" and relatively secure. SSL goes for as low as $10 yearly, but the higher priced ones offer more features and benefits.

- Means of delivering product. How your products/services will be delivered to consumers. Virtual goods like software, ebooks, audio, video, might require the buyer to download once payment is confirmed. Will consumers pick up the goods at your physical store? Will your online store offer shipping? Will it be free or paid? Some stores ship free to a particular city/state. Will this method suit your business model?

- At what level of your site's administration do you want to get involved? Will you be the administrator? Or will you oversee the administrator? Your answer here determines what level of skill you'll need to successfully run the business. As the administrator, HTML and CSS knowledge is highly recommended.

Because the requirements isn't exhaustive, we will stop here for now.

When other points show up, they will be addressed appropriately.

Meanwhile, questions, suggestions and contributions are welcome. But please let those comments remain within the context of our discussion.

Why Use WordPress?

According to Wikipedia, E-commerce (Electronic commerce) "is trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems."

Unlike the regular kinds of businesses we know, having an E-commerce business doesn't require a physical location. It certainly requires an online presence.

And the platform most likely to use is the internet.

Following

You will need a web developer if you intend to build your E-commerce site from the ground up. But a smarter way to go about it is to use a Content Management System (CMS), which provides most of the tools to building your site. Using a CMS will greatly reduce the amount of time and money spent on building your website.

Simply put, a CMS is a web application that lets you create websites in less than 10 minutes. It contain tools required to set up ANY kind of website.

Our choice of CMS for E-commerce site is because of the short time it takes to set up, much cheaper alternative, and you can manage the website with little or no technical skills.

Wordpress isn't the only CMS application available. There are hundreds of them, and most are designed for specific purposes. Wordpress was created initially for blogs, but due to it's flexibility, it can be used to build just any site. You're only limited by your imagination, and the level of knowledge and information you have about Wordpress.

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Listed below are 3 of the most popular CMS:

1. Wordpress
2. Drupal
3. Joomla

As a developer, I've used all three for different projects and they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

I'll start with Drupal.

Drupal is a free, open source web-development platform that allows you to easily publish contents online. It is used to build websites from blogs, news websites, social network to E-commerce websites.

Drupal's strength lies in it's Drupal community that develops and distributes most of the add-ons of the core Drupal distribution.

These add-ons consists of modules (codes designed to perform certain functions), themes (templates used to customize the look and feel of your Drupal site), and distributions (fully customized installation of Drupal e.g a wiki, social media, or job recruitment site). If there's any feature or function you want to build into a website, there's probably an add-on already for it.

Due to its large user base, there is extensive documentation on virtually any problem on Drupal. If you can't find the solution you're looking for, you can open a thread in the community and you'll definitely get responses from other skilled developers.

Drupal loads relatively fast, modular in design, fairly secure and boasts of a lot of other great features.

It is also a good choice for an E-commerce website. Though for reasons which will be later highlighted, we decided against using Drupal for this project.

Weaknesses of Drupal

- Drupal can be very intimidating for new user. Just logon on to the system as the administrator and any user will find himself overwhelmed by so many options and configurations. Customizing Drupal systems is much easier for experienced and skilled developers.

- Load time slower than Wordpress. Though Drupal load time seems faster when compared to other CMS, especially with it's page caching system, in comparison to Wordpress it's load time is slower. A possible reason given for this is that Drupal being a general-purpose management system, it comes loaded with codes that can support just any kind of website you intend to build. While Wordpress was originally designed for blogs.

- Cost of maintaining a Drupal site can be significant, since you'll need an admin who's comfortable with at least HTML, CSS and PHP in order to get your money's worth.

- "Unfriendliness" of Drupal community to armature webmasters. I initially pointed out that any webmaster that has problems with his Drupal installation can open up a thread stating the specific problem. Responses on threads made by newbies or "armatures" hardly get the needed response, thereby making it difficult to get the answer you're seeking for.

- Lastly, my observations on using Drupal is that most of the distributed modules are free, unlike Drupal where developers sell a scaled-down version of their plugin for free while the paid versions come with more features. This reason, I believe, makes the developers less motivated than their Wordpress counterparts in the number, usefulness and features of these add-ons.

With all said, Druapl still remains one of the best options for E-commerce website, especially with the popular Ubercart and Drupal Commerce modules. And other distributions for Drupal that handle E-commerce.

About Joomla!

Estimated to be the second largest Content Management System after Wordpress, with about 50 million downloads. Joomla is also free and open source web application whose development is community-driven.

Joomla is best for developers and those that need a powerful, extensible CMS. It is a solid offering that has a lot of functionality. Just like Drupal and Wordpress, Joomla has a huge collection of readily available extensions and themes for users.

One strength of Joomla is it's ease of use when compared to Drupal, though Wordpress comes out tops in this category. It's large following and community of users ensure that you get the right documentation for almost anything you need.

Joomla allows multiple users to edit a site at the same time.

Joomla has a large community devoted to it, with a million module creators, but that can get frustrating to find the right one for your needs. Sometimes you have to resort to using commercial modules which can cost a lot of money.

Joomla is also multi-purpose, allowing you to build different types of websites on it.

That said, Joomla is also good for E-commerce sites.

Joomla Weaknesses

- Steep learning curve for the beginners. Though not nearly as difficult as Drupal in terms of administration, a newbie to Joomla may find it overwhelming.

- Due to complexities of the built-in features of the Joomla platform, load time of it's pages are arguably slower than Drupal and Wordpress.

- Though Joomla boasts of lots of extensions for additional features, getting good, feature-rich extensions will cost you money.

- Joomla is a multi-purpose CMS that serves small to medium sized websites, but in terms of flexibility, Drupal remains your best bet.

E-commerce websites can also be successfully run on Joomla, though in future posts we'll see why Wordpress remains our choice.

Like Drupal and Joomla, Wordpress is free and open source, designed originally for blogging. It is arguably the most installed CMS with over 22.7% of all web sites using it. That translates to a share of about 60.5% of the total CMS market.

Praised for it's ease of use, well documented online manual, extensibility, and flexibility, Wordpress has since being used to create attractive and feature-rich web sites beyond what it's original intent.

In order to save time and space, I'll leave you to research online for extensive articles of Wordpress evolution. Let's look at some of the things that make Wordpress a great choice for this project.

Wordpress Strengths

Personally, the greatest strength of Wordpress lies in its ease of use. So intuitive that anyone who has used an email would be able to use it. The best CMS to start with for any beginner. You do not need profiency in any programming technology.

It's flexible, can be used to create just about any kind of site.

Wordpress is extensible through lots of themes and plugins (used to add functionality to your site). Actually, the later part of this thread will focus on certain required plugins that give your Wordpress installation the E-commerce functionality.

Lots of documentation. Probably find solutions to any problem you would encounter while using Wordpress.

Wordpress has being reported to be the best CMS when it comes to page load time. Loads faster than Joomla and Drupal. For any kind of website you're building, this is a plus.

Best for blogging.

Wordpress Weaknesses

Because of its large user base, hackers are always attracted to Wordpress. That explains the frequents upgrades and updates for Wordpress installations.

For those of us who like to challenge ourselves by taking up tougher tasks, you find yourself outgrowing Wordpress and it's "simplicity"

Wordpress is not as flexible as Drupal. It's best for blogging, while Drupal is great for almost any web site.

Our reasons for using Wordpress are mainly because more people have experience using it than other CMS, and also for it's ease of use.

There are two vital components of a Wordpress installation - Themes and Plugins. Themes are used to customize the look and feel. While plugins handle what your site can do. To achieve E-commerce functionality on a Wordpress site, we make use of plugins designed for such.

We will using the Woocommerce plugin for our E-commerce website. It is one of the most widely used E-commerce plugins, and there are other plugins with Nigerian features that suits businesses in Nigeria - features like Nigerian states, online payment processors for Nigerians.

So get ready to get your working gloves on.

In order to use Wordpress, you either instal it on your computer, or you get hosting on the internet. Either way is fine, as the process of installation and setup has being simplified.

@ op
what a great thread
Am following.

delesule: @ op
what a great thread
Am following.

Thanks. Still expecting questions, suggestions, comments ...

Wordpress is a web application that runs on a server. To set up Wordpress on your personal computer (works without internet connectivity), you need to instal the web server XAMPP.

You can download XAMPP here https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html. It's free. Make sure you get the version that works with your Windows Operating System.

XAMPP instals into your root directory (C: Drive in most cases).

XAMPP can be installed the same way you instal other applications - just read the instructions as follow.



XAMPP for Windows exists in three different flavors:

Installer:
Probably the easiest way to install XAMPP.

ZIP:
For purists: XAMPP as ordinary ZIP archive.

7zip:
For purists with low bandwidth: XAMPP as 7zip archive.

Note: If you extract the files, there can be false-positives virus warnings.

Using the installer:

The XAMPP control panel for start/stop Apache, MySQL, FilaZilla & Mercury or install these server as services.

Installing from ZIP

Unzip the zip archives into the folder of your choice. XAMPP is extracting to the subdirectory "C:\xampp" below the selected target directory. Now start the file "setup_xampp.bat", to adjust the XAMPP configuration to your system.

If you choose a root directory "C:\" as target, you must not start "setup_xampp.bat".

Like with the installer version, you can now use the "XAMPP Control Panel" for additional tasks.

Installing XAMPP

Step 1: In your web browser, go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

Step 2: Click on the download link for XAMPP.

Step 3: When prompted for the download, click "Save" and wait for your download to finish.

Step 4: Once your download is complete, install the program, click on "Run"

How do i know that my system is 32bit or 64bit?

Step 5: Accept the default settings. A command will open and offer an initial installation prompt. Just hit the Enter key, and accept the default settings. To simplify installation, just hit ENTER when prompted on the command line. You can always change settings, by editing the configuration files later.

Step 6: When your installation is complete, exit the command window by typing x on the command line.

Step 7: Start the XAMPP Control Panel.

Step 8: Start the Apache and MySQL components. You can also start the other components, if you plan to use them.

Step 9: Verify the Apache install, by clicking on the Apache administrative link in the Control Panel.

Setp 10: Verify the MySQL installation, by clicking on the MySQL administrative link in the XAMPP Control Panel.

If the verification steps are successful, XAMPP should be successfully installed on your PC. Open a browser and enter "localhost" on your address bar. You will be redirected to a page telling you that you've successfully installed xampp on your system

delesule: How do i know that my system is 32bit or 64bit?

Windows Vista, 7, and 8 users

1. Open System by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, right-clicking Computer, and then clicking Properties.

2. Under System, you can view the system type.

Windows XP users

1. Click Start.

2. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.

- If you don't see "x64 Edition" listed, then you're running the 32-bit version of Windows XP.

- If "x64 Edition" is listed under System, you're running the 64-bit version of Windows XP.

Installing Wordpress on Xampp

After the success installation of XAMPP on your computer, you can access it from your C: Drive.

You can build web pages using HTML, CSS, PHP and host it on XAMPP. Ours will be used to host our Wordpress website. To start using XAMPP, you have to first launch the Control Panel.

Go to your C: Drive, and open the folder "xampp", locate the file "xampp-control" and launch it. You will see the image displayed below.

Click on "Start" for both the Apache and MySql options to get your web server running

Bros i dey follow you... ride on

Great tutorials bro.

I really wonder why you are giving out such information for free. May God bless your kind heart.

I cannot say how glad I have coming across this thread. I appreciate your time, effort, and commitment you are putting into this project just to pass the knowledge to others...you're are on of a kind pal

So-therefore, I'm subscribing

Thanks @Bigdream, blink182, dljbd1, If more people can understand and apply these things, I'm sure we can significantly reduce the unemployment rate in the country.

Download Wordpress from https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress. The great thing about the Wordpress installer downloaded from Bitnami site is that the Wordpress automatically instals into XAMPP, making it a much easier installation process.

After installing the Wordpress, you access it using the URL, (Always make sure you launch the "xampp-control" file, Start Apache & MySQL, everytime you want to access your web page, if not the page will not load" type into your web browser http://localhost/wordpress/ and you will be directed to your wordpress site.

If you see the welcome page for your Wordpress, means installation was successful, otherwise, you might need to go through the steps all over to find out where the problem arose from. If you still have trouble finding out the source of the problem, you can state it here on this thread and we will address it.

genny2kuk: Thanks @Bigdream, blink182, dljbd1, If more people can understand and apply these things, I'm sure we can significantly reduce the unemployment rate in the country.

Very true